The field of the invention is medical imaging, and particularly, the processing of textual information for display on medical images.
Text is often overlaid on top of medical images prior to review by a doctor or medical technologist. The medical images are two or three-dimensional arrays of digitized data that are produced by imaging equipment such as MRI systems, x-ray systems, CT scanners, PET scanners and nuclear medicine systems. This digital data is downloaded to a workstation where textual information is added by rendering characters on top of the displayed image.
Text strings are often displayed on medical images to show patient information, image attributes and properties. Text strings are also displayed on images at the user""s prompting to reference an image or a specific part of anatomy on an image. There are many ways of displaying text strings, and many options that can be customized. Some of these options are standard display parameters such as font, color, bold, italic, underline, etc., but some options are very customized and need to be designed for each specific application. For instance, when displaying grayscale text over an anatomic image, it can be made more readable by adding a shadow to the text. This shadow (and the shade of the text itself) may need to change based upon the shades of gray in the medical image underneath the text. These custom parameters may need to be done in a certain order. For instance, determining the color of a shadow may need to be done after determining the color of the text itself, so as to provide the right amount of contrast. Custom parameters may need to be modified and/or added at run-time also, so the ability to support new parameters and to change old parameters needs to be easily extensible.
The present invention enables textual information or labels to be added to medical images. More specifically, textual information is packaged as an object along with a set of properties information and the object is passed through a pipeline comprised of a set of formatters which each are configured to set certain properties in the object. The text is rendered to a display using the formatted properties information in the object. The pipeline and the individual formatters are easily configurable and enable text to be rendered in an optimal manner on each medical image.